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The Ascent of Man is a thirteen-part documentary television series produced by the BBC and Time-Life Films which was first transmitted in 1973. It was written and presented by Jacob Bronowski. Intended as a series of "personal view" documentaries in the manner of Kenneth Clark's 1969 series Civilisation, Ascent received acclaim for Bronowski's highly informed but eloquently simple analysis, his long unscripted monologues and its extensive location shoots. The book of the series, The Ascent of Man: A Personal View by J. Bronowski, is an almost word-for-word transcript from the television episodes, diverging from Bronowski's original narration only where the lack of images might make its meaning unclear. A few details of the film version were omitted from the book: notably, Part 11, "Knowledge or Certainty," begins by showing the face of Stefan Borgrajewicz as an elderly man who had known suffering; at the end, after Bronowski shows us the ruins of Hiroshima and the ash-strewn pond of Auschwitz, we see a photograph of a younger man, with the name "BOR-GRAJEWICZ, Stefan" and the number 125558, which may be his official record in the archives of Auschwitz. Just over a year after the series appeared, Bronowski, aged 66, died of a heart attack. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Man

Posted by Conscious Video on January 1, 2011 at 9:02 PM

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